A former Navy submarine technician was arrested Monday afternoon after driving an SUV into FBI headquarters near Atlanta, law enforcement said. It’s unclear why the suspect, Ervin Lee Bolling, tried to force his way into the headquarters, but research conducted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan public-interest nonprofit and shared exclusively with Wired, found that he is believed to be related to Accounts associated with Bolling have shared numerous conspiracy theories related to social media platforms, including X and Facebook.
Matthew Upshaw, an FBI agent assigned to the Atlanta field office, wrote in a sworn statement on Tuesday that Bolling crashed his burnt-orange SUV with South Carolina license plates just after noon on Monday. The final barrier to the FBI’s Atlanta headquarters. Upshaw added that after Bolling crashed the SUV, he left the car and attempted to follow an FBI employee into a secure parking lot. When agents instructed Bolling to sit on the curb, he refused and tried again to enter the premises. The affidavit also states that when agents later attempted to detain Bolling, he resisted arrest.
Bolin was charged Tuesday with damaging government property, according to court records reviewed by WIRED.
Advance Democracy researchers discovered an account on X called @alohatiger11, a reference to Clemson University’s mascot, which Bolin endorsed on his public Facebook page. The handle is similar to usernames on other platforms such as Telegram and Cash App, as well as Facebook pages bearing Bolling’s name. The profile picture used in X’s account is also similar to the photo of the same person shown on Bolling’s public Facebook profile. Account X is currently set to private, but dozens of its older posts are still publicly viewable through the Internet Archive.
In December 2020, Account Just looking for a good militia to join.”
Around the same time, social media accounts seemingly associated with Bolling repeatedly promoted QAnon content and interacted with QAnon promoters, including posting a link to a now-deleted QAnon-related YouTube channel with the comment: “Free the Kraken” — A direct quote from Sidney Powell’s failed legal effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
There are also various posts related to anti-vaccine memes on a Facebook account believed to be Bolling’s.
The accounts also posted posts in support of former President Donald Trump. “I Love You” was posted in December 2020 in response to a post Trump made on X that falsely claimed the election was rigged by Democrats.
Courtney Bolling, identified on Facebook as the suspect’s wife, did not respond to requests for comment by phone or messages sent to her social media profiles. Records do not list legal counsel for Bolling.
So far, it’s unclear how Bolling came to espouse these beliefs, but far-right groups and extremists have used social media platforms for decades as a way to spread conspiracies and radicalize new members. In recent years, there have been many examples of far-right groups making claims or threats online that quickly led to real-world violence.